Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence, by Frances Wilson
Who turned D H Lawrence into a must-not-read?
Some say it was the writer Kate Millett, who did a hatchet job on him in Sexual Politics back in 1971. Others point out that Ken Russell didn’t help. No one who’s seen his 1969 adaptation of Women in Love can hope ever to forget Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling naked, dongs dangling, in front of that raging fire – or argue that Millett had no
cause to call Lawrence phallocentric. At least, not with a straight face.
In her very unusual biography, Frances Wilson offers up another culprit: F R Leavis, the very man who proclaimed Lawrence ‘the great genius of our time’.
He placed two Lawrence novels on the list of Great Books that several generations of students had to read and revere, or else. But he paid little attention to Lawrence’s short stories, essays, poetry, travel writing, letters or literary criticism. It is in these writings, Wilson tells us, that Lawrence the genius can be found.
There is no getting away, though, from Lawrence the rebel, Lawrence the seer, Lawrence the walking, ranting mass of contradictions. This was, after all, the man who invented autofiction. Impossible, says Wilson, to draw a line between his
writings and his life. His ‘letters are stories, his stories are poems, his poems are dramas, his dramas are memoirs, his memoirs are travel books, his travel books are novels, his novels are sermons, his sermons are manifestos for the novel, and his manifestos for the novel, like all his writings on history, his literary criticism, and the tales in this book, are accounts of what it was like to be D H Lawrence.’
Her ambition here is to write in that same spirit. This she most certainly does, in leaps of imagination that are bound to confound some traditionally minded readers but that I found enthralling, perplexing and inspiring in equal measure. In place of the usual passage from cradle to fame to grave, she presents us with what she calls a triptych – three stories that take us through his maddest and most productive decade – using Dante as her guide.
Although Lawrence knew Dante’s Italy and could quote him at will, his poet gods were Shelley and Whitman. Dante figured more as a ghost in his library’s far shadows. It was Rebecca West, writing just after his death, who first suggested Dante as the key to Lawrence’s strange mind and ways. Whatever his subject, she said, he was always writing about the state of his own soul. In this, he was like Dante, ‘who made a new Heaven and Hell and Purgatory as a symbol for the geography within his own breast’.
This, then, is Wilson’s bold wager – that by mapping Lawrence’s mad wanderings against Dante’s ascent from Inferno to Purgatory to Paradise, she can cast some light on his tortured, if also divinely comic, soul.
We begin in the Inferno that was Cornwall 1915 to 1919. He’s just been prosecuted for The Rainbow. He’s made himself doubly unpopular by speaking out against the war. The local police are spying on him, convinced that he and his German wife Frieda are sending secret messages to the enemy. And then there is the stream of famous and infamous writers drifting through, to drink whatever they can lay their hands on while throwing lapis-lazuli paperweights at each other’s heads. There are more badly behaved literati in the Purgatory of Italy from 1919 to 1922, with plenty of room for monks, seductive spongers and monied friends who fall over themselves to put the Lawrences up for free.
It is yet another heiress who calls them to Taos in the mountains of New Mexico. Here they find Paradise but the serpent is already in residence, for their bossy, preening hostess is secretly syphilitic. An unkind reader might find in this a long-overdue lesson for Lawrence, who was secretly tubercular all his adult life, never once admitting it even to himself. For all his passionate words about the primacy of sex, he may also have been infertile, or even impotent.
Open as he was about loving his mother like a lover, frank as he was in his fascination for male bodies, he couldn’t bear anyone – male or female – touching his own.
But every day, he sat down at his desk to do battle with his contradictions, and on his good days he found his way through to a clearing; an open window; a cliff with a view. The words he used to describe what he saw before him might be his own soul writ large, but it is impossible to read them without sharing his awe for the natural world, as well as his fear for it. In this, as in his writings about politics, war and the age of the machine, he speaks to the present moment.
Wilson would therefore like us to put aside the pillow talk for which he is best remembered, to consider why, 50 years after being removed from the canon, he is still on trial. This book is her case for acquittal. She offers it up in prose that rivals Lawrence in its fervour and precision, mixing her own voice and imagination in with his.
Though she never lets him off the hook or strays, as he so often did, from the written record, the fare will still be too rich – too Lawrentian – for some palates. But, for the rest of us, it will be a book to save and reread, puzzle over and cherish.